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No, they don’t know it’s Christmas

Adele says no to Band Aid, and Bob Geldof's Do They Know It's Christmas model gets roasted by critics

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Some of the biggest names in British pop and rock music have recorded a new version of the Band Aid charity song to raise money to combat Ebola in West Africa. But will technology mean they'll never be able to replicate the success of the single fir(Reuters - Business Video Online)

It used to be simple. Some rock star would feel an impulse to help, congregate an all-star cast of his friends, spend an afternoon recording a song (the quality of which was implicitly understood to be secondary to the cause) and, hopefully, raise millions of dollars while reaping the admiration of a public that might include some potential customers for your next album.

In 2014, that model has been blasted to hell.

“I have so many problems with the latest Band Aid single that I don’t really know where to begin,” Bryony Gordon writes in the Telegraph this week.

But if she had to pick just one, she goes on, it would be Band Aid 30 organizer Sir Bob Geldof’s petulant reaction to the absence of British star Adele, who had been featured in the initial announcement for “Do They Know It’s Christmas? (2014)” but who, her manager said, had never agreed to participate.

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“She doesn’t want to be bothered by anyone. She won’t pick up the phone to her manager,” Geldof told the U.K.’s Sun newspaper. “She’s bringing up a family, you know.”

Bob Geldof's new version of the song 'Do They Know It's Christmas' is intended to help raise money to battle the Ebola crisis. Not everyone is onside with Geldof, who blasted Adele for not taking part. (Adam Berry / GETTY IMAGES)

Irish singer-songwriter Bob Geldof, right, and Scottish musician and singer-songwriter Midge Ure at a press briefing in London, to announce the launch of #BandAid30 to raise funds to fight Ebola in west Africa, Monday. (Matt Dunham / AP)

To the Telegraph’s Gordon, along with much of the British media, “The message is loud and clear, even if the music isn’t: Geldof is here to save West Africa from Ebola, and Adele, with her peculiar un-celebrity desire to sod the limelight as she brings up a toddler, is a selfish little woman who must be publicly humiliated.”

Even more potent was an eloquent, conflicted column by Fuse ODG, a British hip-hop star of Ghanaian descent. After being approached by Geldof, he expressed concerns about what he felt was the negative light in which Africa is portrayed by Western media. Geldof, he said, agreed.

“However, on receiving the proposed lyrics on Thursday — two days before the recording was due to take place in London — I was shocked and appalled by their content,” Fuse wrote.

Perhaps he shouldn’t have been. Even back in 1984, the song’s original lyrics engendered ambivalence. In particular, the line “Tonight, thank God it’s them instead of you” and the crude characterization of Africa as a place “Where nothing ever grows” were viewed as deeply problematic, to the point that both have been replaced in the new version though, arguably, not improved. The latter, for instance, is now part of an ungainly couplet that goes, “Why is comfort to be feared/Why is touch to be scared.”

“In truth,” Fuse continues, “my objection to the project goes beyond the offensive lyrics. I, like many others, am sick of the whole concept of Africa — a resource-rich continent with unbridled potential — always being seen as diseased, infested and poverty-stricken.”

Blur co-founder Damon Albarn raised another sticky issue. “There are problems with our idea of charity,” he told The Independent, “especially these things that suddenly balloon out of nothing and then create a media frenzy where some of that essential communication is lost and it starts to feel like it’s a process where if you give money you solve the problem, and really sometimes giving money creates another problem.”

None of that has stopped this fourth iteration of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” from becoming the fastest-selling British single of 2014, racking up 206,000 copies sold a day after its release last week.

Still, the most salient point among all the collective barbs is being obscured. After observing of the musicians that “Almost everyone is white, Anglo Saxon, which gives the single an unwelcome colonial feel,” Dan Matthews in Forbes targets the heart of the matter, that “the public outcry caused by the tackiness, condescension and hypocrisy of the single — not to mention the fact that they’ve wheeled out the same song again — is for the most part irrelevant to the cause. The danger is, of course, that it’ll put people off buying the single and that Ebola victims won’t get as much money as they would have.”

VINYL COUNTDOWN: In one of the more welcome vinyl debuts of the season, Loreena McKennitt’s A Mid Winter’s Night Dream will come out on record for the first time, Dec. 2. The 2008 album was an expanded version of an EP, A Winter Garden, which McKennitt first put out in 1995. Pressed from the original high-resolution masters, it’ll be limited to a global run of 5,000 copies.

Remember the days when a band could release seven singles from one album? “Just a Girl,” “Don’t Speak” and “Spiderwebs” were among the tracks pulled from No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom, which returns Dec. 16 in a new vinyl version.

Out on the same day in Canada is a 20th anniversary vinyl edition of one of the mainstays of California hip hop. A two-LP set of Warren G’s Regulate . . . G Funk Era features the regular album on disc one and a pair of new remixes of the title track — which samples Michael McDonald’s keyboards from his cover of Leiber and Stoller’s I Keep Forgettin’ — on disc two.

RETRO/ACTIVE: Had he done nothing more than co-write/co-produce Donna Summer’s boundary-pushing “I Feel Love,” Giorgio Moroder would have a permanent spot as a revered architect of electronic dance music.

But after coming out of semi-retirement last year to contribute an odd, spoken-word guest spot on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, the septuagenarian has completed his first full album in more than 30 years.

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